Three-body exclusion principle, duality mapping, and exact ground state of a harmonically trapped, ultracold Bose gas with three-body hard-core interactions in one dimension

Abstract

Motivated by previous suggestions that three-body hard-core interactions in lower-dimensional ultracold Bose gases might provide a way for creation of non-Abelian anyons, the exact ground state of a harmonically trapped 1D Bose gas with three-body hard-core interactions is constructed by duality mapping, starting from an $N$-particle ideal gas of mixed symmetry with three-body nodes, which has double occupation of the lowest harmonic oscillator orbital and single occupation of the next $N-2$ orbitals. It has some similarity to the ground state of a Tonks-Girardeau gas, but is more complicated. It is proved that in 1D any system of $N\ge 3$ bosons with three-body hard-core interactions also has two-body soft-core interactions of generalized Lieb-Liniger delta function form, as a consequence of the topology of the configuration space of $N$ particles in 1D, i.e., wave functions with \emph{only} three-body hard core zeroes are topologically impossible. This is in contrast with the case of 2D, where pure three-body hard-core interactions do exist, and are closely related to the fractional quantized Hall effect. The exact ground state is compared with a previously-proposed Pfaffian-like approximate ground state, which satisfies the three-body hard-core constraint but is not an exact energy eigenstate. Both the exact ground state and the Pfaffian-like approximation imply two-body soft-core interactions as well as three-body hard-core interactions, in accord with the general topological proof.